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With my Real-Life job dominating all my time and my spare time it has been incredibly difficult making any substantial progress on my GameEngine, however some mentionable progress has been made.

This last development duration has been filled with research into some new design methods; most significantly is the possibility of a truly seamless world.

By combining Procedural and Static designs I have managed to create an endless world that follows predetermined guidelines while maintaining a level of randomness. This Procedural / Static method allows me to create a ‘defined’ area that the game’s story will take place while also allowing the player to explore beyond the normal bounds. For example the vast ocean space that defines the boundaries of my storyline will also contain unexpected islands and land masses that were not specifically intended. What secrets could these unknown spaces hold?

One difficult setback is that my previous Networking toolset is no longer compatible with this engine and I will have to rebuild that toolset from scratch. Due to the scope of this setback I am forced to set Networking and Multiplayer aside for a later time. While this disappoints me greatly it is necessary for the time being. There are other parts of the Engine that have a greater priority. Keeping all this in mind I have been coding the foundation to allow Networking to be added at a later time.

One persistent issue has been the ability to break up the world into manageable areas. With a Procedural/Static engine this issue has come to the forefront. My previous approach to how I will manage this issue seems to stand as a viable method. Each ‘zone’ will contain all the information to house the necessary slice of the world area along with the ability to generate the remaining surrounding area on the fly. As a player moves out of the zoned area they will be handed off to the next zone and that zone will pickup the player from there. If a player passes into an ‘uncharted’ area the GameEngine will continue to generate that part of the world as needed and maintain supervision over that player regardless how far that player travels out of the zone bounds; until such a time that another zone is specified.

I am hoping to use my vacation time at the end of the year to push forward and have a working technology demo at the end of January; but that is also contingent on my real-life obligations.

I worked on making an automatically updating company contact list and document list application for iOS. The App would automatically check for changes in contact information or documents based on individual groups.

The idea was that only a single department needed to update their single contact list or their document list. InHouse would monitor each group for changes and compile the groups into a single searchable list.

These Lists and Documents could be downloaded to the iOS device and used ‘offline’ or without internet access. The app would manage its own memory footprint by monitoring documents for their ‘last used’ stamp, allowed the older unused documents to be overwritten by newer more frequently used documents.

The app was also able to locate the correct regional salesman and their contact information based on the iOS device’s GPS location.

Here is a 3D Printed half scale mount for the system computer on the machines I work on at work. We never used it, but I always wondered what it would look like if we did make one. So having a 3D printer, I printed one. I am quite satisfied with this design and I may use it for myself.